Statically-typed functional programming has received more attention in the age of blockchain than perhaps ever before. Languages like Haskell and PureScript were once thought to have a more natural home in academia than in industry. Now their powerful static analysis and security guarantees allow blockchain developers to prove more about the correctness of their programs. This is especially important as we move into the era of application-specific blockchains and scaling solutions written in ordinary languages.

We’ll walk through the state of Ethereum libraries and tooling in Haskell and PureScript to highlight some of their interesting features, as well as compare and contrast them with their counterparts in non-functional languages. We’ll also discuss the ongoing work on hs-abci, the Haskell bindings to the Tendermint ABCI protocol, which enables Haskell developers to write application specific blockchains backed by cosmos/Tendermint.

The session will be a mix of live demonstrations and slides. There will be a repository to follow along with for the interactive portions